A Southport woman has spoken out about her terror as a flight she was on was battered so badly by Storm Doris it tried to land four times.

Helen Lloyd, 26, was on the 8am Icelandair flight from Reykjavik when she experienced the full force of the storm as her plane was hit by the winds and tried to land at Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds Bradford before running out of fuel and making an emergency landing.

Helen was on the final leg of a journey from the US after travelling around the world since November. As a nervous flier, she hoped the experience might make her more comfortable with planes.

She said: “It got to the point where we were about to land in Manchester - we were so close to landing you could see roofs, people in cars... then the pilot said they were aborting the landing because of the wind.

“It was quite scary at this point - it wasn’t like regular turbulence, the plane was vibrating from side to side.

“The clouds were really low but usually as you drop through them it stops shaking, but this didn’t.